What do you do?

[GregE]

Many of you have done DR testing at many levels and we are nearing our first DR test.

My manager asked me a question I had thought about, but really could only answer with......"we just won't have that data."

The question is, what do you do if you get your tapes to the DR site and discover that a necessary file (or many files) are missing? Bad tape, broken tape, etc.

What we don't want is for something crucial to kill our expensive and time consuming DR test. But my answer to my manager is what it is, short of having a primary volume rushed to the site.

What do you guys think about such a situation?

 

[Jacob_6]

We usually have our primary site send the tape we need to complete the DR. In the real situation, the primary site is destroyed, I would explain the issue and that we were not able to recover the data.

 

[chad_small]

If its business critical to the point of do or die then the company should establish a remote mirror of that data. Otherwise you would probably roll the data back to a previous version. Just because one "version" was damaged doesn't mean you couldn't reconstruct the server from previous versions. Not perfect or wanted, but if it gets you back up and running you take what you can get.

 

[Mikey D]

Sometimes when we've encountered that we just restore back to a day before that damaged file. Depending on the level of media failure that sometimes can get things back up but like everyone else mentioned. It's a very real possibility and has happened to use more than once that a tape gets damaged in shipping or what not.

 

[GregE]

Thanks everyone.

It's always a possibility of course, and when the other side of the house (iSeries guys running BRMS backups) are taking two different days of backups, a primary recovery point, and secondary recovery point in case the primary is fouled up, they are in that mindset of full+incremental and a tape-centric backup system, where TSM is neither. Hard to explain to someone that we will NOT be taking two "sets of TSM tapes, 10 days apart" because that's not how TSM works. We'll take several days of TSM dbbackup, but that's different.